In it for the long haul

But a liberal democracy ready to join the EU is still the best bet

IT HAS become a joke for The Economist to say that a country is at a crossroads, yet for Turkey it happens to be spot on. The next year or two will be critical to where the country is going.

The economy is in better shape than at any time since the second world war. At its current breathtaking growth rate Turkey is catching up fast with the poorer countries of continental Europe. The political judgment is less straightforward. The AK government under Mr Erdogan has done more than any since Ataturk to reform Turkey. It has pushed through many political and legal reforms. It has taken big steps towards resolving the Kurdish question. If it is re-elected next year, AK will make an overdue start on rewriting the constitution drawn up after the 1980 military coup.

What would Ataturk say?

Yet this is also where the doubts start to creep in. The secular establishment's concern about Mr Erdogan and the AK party has always been that behind the reassuring “mildly Islamist” label lie deeper fundamentalist ambitions. People in the cafés of Istanbul fret that, if the veil were allowed in state institutions, the next stop would be Iran. Yet although many in AK, including Mr Erdogan, are doubtless pious, Turkey is surely too democratic, pluralist and, well, modern for this to be a serious danger. The lesson of the past decade is that the secularists have cried wolf too often—and as a result have lost most of their battles with AK.

It is the condition of Turkey's democracy that is more worrying. The AK leadership, especially Mr Erdogan, has proved highly partisan and intolerant of criticism. That has turned Turkey into a deeply divided country. The results of the September referendum were revealing: a big yes in most of Anatolia (save in the Kurdish region) but a firm no in large parts of Istanbul, Izmir and the west. To overcome such divisions when it comes to drawing up a new constitution, Mr Erdogan needs to find a way of working with the opposition, but he shows no signs of doing this. Turkey has long lacked a credible opposition, but the new CHP leader, Mr Kilicdaroglu, could yet come to fill that gap.

A longish period of one-party rule has also fostered a culture that tolerates corruption at the heart of the government. The party's leaders may be clean, but many of those around them are not. Another problem is Mr Erdogan's autocratic manner, which risks trammelling free debate in the media. Critics who sometimes liken him to Russia's Vladimir Putin have got it wrong, but many journalists in Istanbul and Ankara now feel that they cannot say or write what they think.

Turkey is not the only European country to suffer from corruption, autocratic leadership or fears about a free press. But because there are already so many vocal opponents of its aspirations to join the EU, its membership hopes are damaged every time that there is a fresh outburst of criticism from Brussels of another bout of political turmoil at home.

Keep persevering

Plenty of Turks, including some in AK, are starting to say that it does not matter. The EU is not going to admit Turkey anyway, they argue, so why should they care what the Europeans think? Yet in truth, although Turkey has developed new relationships in the Middle East and even with Russia, as a liberal market democracy it has no real alternative to Europe. Its hopes of joining the EU may not be realised for many years, but Turkey will not be the first country that has had trouble getting in: Britain took 12 years and Spain nine.

Besides, Turkey needs to keep on modernising for its own sake, not just to please the Brussels bureaucracy. So long as it keeps on track, it will continue both to thrive and to matter—and an EU that wants to remain relevant will find it increasingly hard to keep Turkey out.